Xiaoxuan Ren
FROM “MOW ‘N BLOW” TO “SLOW ‘N FLOW”
Labor, Emissions, and Grassland Management
Thesis:Opportunities exist for community members and a new type of landscape worker to engage in meadow management for bottom-up public spaces through the process of creative land stewardship. This would contribute toward fighting climate change by reducing carbon emissions, raise public awareness to meadow ecology, and increase the valuation of maintenance labor while engendering diverse landscape aesthetic experience.Positioning: Meadow systems store much more CO2 compared to the urban monoculture lawns, and shrubby areas. The majority of this storage is happening underground in association with meadow root systems. However, if left to its natural succession, it would turn into woodland. So, some human intervention is required to maintain the meadow status. Currently, small scale meadows are maintained by “small, off-road engines,” according to an Environmental Protection Agency study, the emission for these machines would account for 4 percent of CO2 emissions nationwide. They’re also major components of smog, and belch out a number of cancer-causing pollutants. it is time to privilege clean, low-capital labor over high emission labor strategies. And to lift the image of high-labor grassland management towards a creative and often meditative practice. This meadow landscape maintenance process is done by landscaping professionals, landscape in public spaces is taken for granted for the way they are and the public’s common perception of landscape is often reduced to a mono-aesthetic visual experience during certain seasons. There is a need for public engagement in poly-aesthetic experience through the process of creatively stewarding the landscape which could build connections between people, with the natural environment and other species around us.Current landscape architecture practices would deliver completed project renderings that froze a landscape at one perfect time in space, devaluing the landscape process and the labor that goes into building, shaping, and maintaining it. Dead plant materials and fallen leaves are seen as wastes to be cleared and hauled away from the “perfect” landscape garden; maintenance’s goal is always to keep the landscape looking neat and clean.This project is about creating a series of playful spatial “infrastructures” with existing, unattended meadow plant form, materials and patterns through maintenance acts of clearing, dethatching, cutting back, and mowing, to encourage ways of creative stewardship of landscape and acknowledge and give value to the labor and “by-product” of the maintenance process. It is an attempt to move away from renderings of completed project imagery of landscape architecture practice (Terremoto, Landscape Architecture Has a Labor Acknowledgment Problem) to emphasize the labor input and landscape process of the meadow ecosystem.
